Josaphata Hordashevska

Blessed Josaphata Hordashevska was born Michaelina Hordashevska on 20 November 1869 in Lviv, then known as Lemberg, capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria in Austria-Hungary. She grew up in a Ukrainian Greek Catholic family and, as a young woman, desired to enter religious life. Contemplative monasteries of the Byzantine tradition already existed in Galicia, but priests concerned with the pastoral needs of Ukrainian villages wanted an active congregation of sisters who would teach children, nurse the sick, and assist families. Encouraged by the Basilian father Jeremiah Lomnytskyj and by Father Kyrylo Seletskyi, pastor of Zhuzhel, she agreed to become the first member of such a community rather than enter a cloistered order.

In 1892, at Zhuzhel in Galicia, she received the religious habit and the name Josaphata, in honor of Saint Josaphat Kuntsevych, and thus became co-foundress of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate. The new institute combined Byzantine liturgical life with an active apostolate. Sister Josaphata served as the first superior, formed the earliest novices, and herself taught, nursed, and organized charitable work. The congregation spread quickly through Galician towns and villages, opening schools, kindergartens, and small infirmaries and working among peasants and the urban poor. She was noted for practical competence, poverty of life, and a willingness to take on humble tasks.

Her later years were marked by illness and by internal difficulties within the still-young congregation. She suffered from tuberculosis of the bone, which caused intense and prolonged pain and limited her mobility. At the same time she experienced periods of removal from positions of authority and misunderstandings with some clergy and sisters concerning the government and spirit of the institute. Contemporary accounts and later hagiography present her as accepting these trials in a spirit of obedience and without seeking to justify herself publicly. She continued to live as a professed Sister Servant until her death.

Josaphata Hordashevska died in Lviv on 7 April 1919, at the age of forty-nine, during the unsettled period that followed the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the fighting between Polish and Ukrainian forces over eastern Galicia. The congregation she had helped to found survived the wars of the twentieth century and later Soviet persecution of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and it established houses in North America and elsewhere among the Ukrainian diaspora. Pope John Paul II beatified her in Lviv on 27 June 2001, during his apostolic visit to Ukraine, together with other Ukrainian Greek Catholic blesseds. She has not been canonized. The Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church commemorate her especially on 20 November. She is remembered as a pioneer of active female religious life in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic tradition and as a figure of patient service in sickness and obscurity.